The liberals who control Los Angeles and California will be the first to tell you how much they care about women and the LGBT community. It’s simply not true.
Abigail Shrier writes at Substack:
A Predator’s ParadiseOn a Saturday night in South Los Angeles, cars pull up and idle along the side streets of Figueroa, high beams ablaze, so that the drivers can get a good look at “the girls.” The women stand three astride in the middle of the street, in pasties and G-string bikinis under fishnet dresses. Draped over their shoulders are unzipped coats; even in temperate L.A., the night’s January chill is biting. In seven-inch Lucite heels, they teeter toward the driver of each car the way you might walk barefoot across gravel. Less than a block away, their pimps keep company on a sidewalk corner, in hoodies and loose jeans, watching their quarry, awaiting the payout. Absent is the one thing that might typically break up the party: a police car.In early January, I joined Erin Wilson and Stephany Powell on a tour of “the track” on Figueroa, one of California’s busiest prostitution areas. For decades, Wilson, who volunteers for the anti-trafficking organization Journey Out, and her mother, Powell, have worked to combat human trafficking in Los Angeles and to help women and child victims escape this brutal world.In our postfeminist era, prostitution is so often idealized—“sex work is work”—that it’s easy to overlook the gruesome reality of what it means to have a pimp, an arrangement closer to slavery than to any legitimate job. “The horror stories I could tell you about [prostitutes] being beaten and being choked and being burned and being gang raped,” said Vanessa Russell of Love Never Fails, an anti-trafficking nonprofit based near Oakland. “And the PTSD and all the mental health, the trauma bonding, the psychotic breaks. Maybe you’re somebody who likes to have sex more than once a day. But nine to 21 times with different guys, some that are like 90 years old that smell?”“Nine to 21 times over what period?” I ask.“One day,” she said. “That’s healthy living? I don’t think so. The body is not even made for that. Like the pelvic inflammatory disease that you see.” She ticks off the ways a woman’s body is subjected to microbial assault: the STDs, yeast infections, and UTIs that are frequent among the women she sees. Their hospital records prove, she says, that the human body is “not meant to have that much activity going on. And then the girls that are out there—where they’re being sold—they don’t even get to take showers in between.”
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